The extra pages are below (although I seriously doubt whether they cast any light on the particular issue.) Much more apposite is the fact that a 12 month "Ordinary" year was 10.88 days short of a solar year, so just over one year in three needed to add a thirteenth intercalary month. This means that sequences of 3 successive 12-month years should be very rare in a regular calendar, but there are at least a dozen such sequences in Meritt's Tables (and one sequence of 4 ordinary years). It is virtually inevitable therefore that the Archon calendar went ahead of the Lunar Regulatory calendar on occasion.agesilaos wrote:Well we will have to assume a typo as his article runs to only 73 pages. But the discussion is on pp 221-226 of the book you have scanned, that is what needs to be revealed.
It is still pretty moot concerning Gaugamela, however as we can be certain that the archon date was pretty much in synch with the lunar as the eclipse of the 15 Boedromion lunar coincided with ‘about the start of the Mysteries’ 14 Boedromion archon. Arrian’s Pyanepsion can only come from the month for month equation he used and not any error in Athenian calendar.
Still like to hear Meritt’s argument, though .
I'm afraid that I don't agree that Plutarch knew for sure that the Mysteries were in mid-Boedromion in the Lunar Regulated calendar that he was using. You yourself have pointed out the caginess of his reference, which is because he knew that his statement would only have been roughly true, if the Archon calendar was not too far out of line at that time. He would not have used his approximate language if he actually knew the relative alignment of the two calendars at that point.
We are looking at a situation in 265/4 where there were actually 13 New Moons between the solstices, but the Archon calendar calendar only had 12. It is perfectly true that you could push the discrepancy into the preceding year and suppose that the Archon and Lunar Regulatory calendars became realigned in 265/4. The reason that that is very unlikely to be true is that 264/3 AND 263/2 were 13-month years in the Archon calendar, very strongly suggesting that it had some serious retardation to do (i.e. had gone a long way in advance) to get back in line with Lunar Regulation (and so keep the seasons in the same place in the year.)amyntoros wrote:Would that necessarily have been so? - that the lunar calendar fell a month behind the Archon calendar just because there were 13 New Moons that year? So help me, I took my little pencil and printed out the lunar cycle for 2008-2011. There were 13 New Moons between the beginning of June, 2008 and the end of May, 2009. If we were to convert to a lunar cycle and start each month on the new moon, then the months would have begun thus: June(2008) on the third of June, July on the 3rd of July, August on the 1st of Aug, Sept on the 30th of August, October on the 29th of September, November on the 28th of October, December on the 27th of November, January on the 27th of December, February on the 26th of January, March on the 25th of February, April on the 26th of March, May on the 25th of April, and June (again) on the 24th of May. The next new moon was June 22, pushing it close for the summer solstice to fall in that month, but nothing that a few intercalculary days couldn't fix. So even though there were thirteen New Moons between the solstices, our regular calendar wouldn't have fallen behind that much in 2008-9, and certainly not by a full month.
Best wishes,
Andrew